The Ministry of National Education informs that, for the inclusion in preschool education of children aged between 3 and 6 years, the following stages will take place, successively, at the level of each educational unit:

• re-registration of children who are attending kindergarten this school year and wish to attend it also in the 2018-2019 school year - will start on May 7;
• registration of new children will take place starting May 21.

The schedule for re-registration and registration will be set by the management of the educational unit and will be posted, in a visible place, in every kindergarten, for the information of parents and interested public, including on its website (if it exists), and possibly on the school inspectorates' websites.

Filling the available places, after the completion of the re-registration process, will generally be done in descending order of age groups, as follows: large group (5-year-old children), middle group (4-year-old children), and small group (3-year-old children). Based on Government Decision no. 1.252/2012 and within the limits of available places, children aged between 2 and 3 years can also be enrolled in the small group.

If, in an educational unit, the number of registration requests is higher than the number of available places, general separation criteria and specific separation criteria will be successively applied.

The general separation criteria are as follows:

• existence of a document proving that a child is orphaned from both parents (the situation of a child coming from an orphanage/a foster care center/family placement is assimilated to the status of a child orphaned from both parents);
• existence of a document proving that the child is orphaned from one parent;
• existence of a brother/sister enrolled in the respective educational unit;
• existence of a medical certificate attesting the child's disability degree.

The specific separation criteria (drawn up by each preschool educational unit, approved by its Board of Administration and endorsed by the County School Inspectorate/of the municipality of Bucharest up to May 18) cannot be discriminatory and cannot include pre-registration lists. Also, the specific separation criteria will only be applied after the general criteria are exhausted.

To ensure transparency of the re-registration/registration process, the management of preschool educational units will visibly display, for all interested, the following information:

• the institution's capacity (the number of children for which it was designed);
• the number of places approved through the schooling plan for the 2018-2019 school year (by age groups: small, middle, large);
• the general and specific criteria for the registration of children;
• the number of children re-registered/registered daily (during the set period) from the total available.

We mention that private preschool educational units also have the obligation to display in a visible place the information regarding their status, namely if they are authorized to function provisionally or are accredited by the Agency for Quality Assurance in Pre-University Education (ARACIP).